The MTA is studying whether to actually build QueensLink — the long-pitched plan to run passenger rail on the unused Rockaway Beach rail line between Rego Park and Ozone Park. A feasibility study is now underway, and that's the first concrete process step this project has had in years of advocacy and renderings.
Here's what that means in plain terms: before there's a construction contract, there's an environmental review, and before there's an environmental review, there's a feasibility study that tells the MTA whether the thing is buildable, what it costs, and what it disrupts. QueensLink has been stuck at the advocacy stage — press conferences, City Council hearings, community board votes — without ever getting a formal MTA planning process attached to it. A feasibility study is that process starting.
The line in question is roughly 3.5 miles of unused rail right-of-way connecting the Queens Boulevard and Rockaway Beach subway lines, cutting through central Queens neighborhoods that currently have no direct rail option to JFK-area transit or to the rest of the borough's subway grid. Advocates have pushed it as a cheaper alternative to a competing plan — QueensWay — that would convert the same corridor into a linear park instead.
For contractors, this is a 'put it on the radar, not the calendar' story. A feasibility study typically runs months to a year before any environmental review (SEQRA/NEPA) starts, and construction procurement on a project like this is years out even in a best-case timeline. But MTA rail projects of this scale eventually generate utility relocation work, track and signal contracts, station construction, and multi-year GC packages — the kind of work that rewards firms who start tracking a project before it's biddable. The study itself, when published, will also show the MTA's own cost range for the first time, which is the number every future bid will be measured against.
Queens Eagle first reported that the feasibility study has been commissioned; the MTA has not yet posted a public scope document or RFP for the study itself. Contractors who want to track this should watch the MTA's capital program site and the Queens borough president's office, which has pushed the project, for the study's eventual release.